She gave him a withering look, said nothing.
“That was understandable in the circumstances,” Komarov said. “But now that you actually know he’s committed a serious crime, I expect your full cooperation. Have you heard from him since?”
“No,” she said.
“He left no goodbye message?”
“No,” she repeated. The verse she’d found on the bed that morning when she dropped in to change her clothes was not a message she wanted to share with the Cheka.
“Did he ever mention any future plans?”
She shook her head. “No. He was—is—angry about the way things have been going, but if he had any particular course of action in mind he never talked to me about it.”
“Did he ever speak about India?”
“India?” What mad scheme had Sergei gotten himself involved in? She remembered arriving home a week or so earlier to find him and Aram Shahumian poring over a map of the world. “No, never,” she said. “Comrade Komarov, I think I have the right to know exactly what my husband has done.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Yesterday evening seven men held up the tram depot on Shabolovka Street. A clerk, a Chekist and a militiaman were killed, along with two of the criminals. The five who escaped have been identified as Aidan Brady, Aram Shahumian, your husband, and two Indian comrades who are here for the congress. Last night a man was murdered in the Hotel Lux. He was a Russian, but the room he was found in belonged to one of the missing Indians and one who was killed in the robbery. I suspect that the two events are connected but haven’t as yet been able to establish the connection.”
She felt as though she’d been hit in the stomach.
“I believe you know some of these men . . .” Komarov said.
“I have met Aram several times—he’s a Red Army comrade of Sergei’s, and a friend. As you know, Aidan Brady and I have a long history—he and my brother were both involved in an Irish plot against the British right at the start of the war. I came through Siberia with Brady in 1918—we just happened to meet in Vladivostok—and I saw him a few times after that. He and Sergei met independently, and they’ve remained friends.”
“But not you?”
“No. I haven’t spoken to him since he shot that boy in Kalanchevskaya Square. The incident we talked about three years ago.”
“As I recall, the boy’s death was an accident.”
“In my experience, those sort of accidents tend to happen around Brady.” Until now she had always been on the same side as her fellow American, but she couldn’t remember ever liking him. Even at their first meeting all those years ago, when Brady was still basking in the role of a workers’ crusader, there’d been something not quite right about the man. Something missing.
“And did your husband ever introduce you to any Indian comrades?” Komarov asked.
“No. Never.”
Komarov leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, his chin resting on his interlinked hands. “You said your husband is angry at the way things are going. Why is that? The people he’s involved with—most of them are anarchists, so their resentment is understandable. But your husband is still a member of our party.”
“He is a Bolshevik,” she said simply. A picture of the Universalist clientele crossed her mind, denying the words.
“So are you, Comrade Piatakova, but there are obviously differences of opinion between you.”
“We had—have—different views on who and what we should be fighting.”
“And who do you think the enemy is?” Maslov asked.
She didn’t bother to answer. Where had they gone? Oh, Sergei.
“Answer the question,” Maslov insisted.
“Bureaucrats, careerists, and Neanderthal males,” she said coldly, staring straight at him. “Is that all?” she asked, turning back to Komarov.
“Almost.” He asked her for a description of Aram Shahumian, and then, almost apologetically, for one of her husband. She gave him only the barest of bones, but Komarov made no complaint. “If you hear from him, please inform me,” he said formally. “Your husband has an exemplary record,” he added, “both with the fleet and the army. And I would like to think a tribunal would take that into account.”
Caitlin gave him an incredulous look.
“I heard a joke the other day,” he said unexpectedly. “Not a particularly funny one. The essence of it was that we Bolsheviks consider ourselves magicians but we’ve really only mastered the first half of one particular trick. We’ve managed to saw the person in half but not put him back together again. Well, that’s what we have to do—put Russia back together again. You and your husband are not the only people fighting for beliefs, comrade.”
Several responses came to mind, but none seemed very grown-up. “I assume we’re done,” she said, getting to her feet.
“For the moment, yes.”
Turning on her heel, she strode back across the outer office, down the grey corridors, and out into the moonlit city, where people who didn’t have fugitive partners were happily going about their lives.
The Only Good Indian
“We got a bunch of contradictory sightings at the railway stations,” Ruzhkov said. “Someone who looked like the American at the Kazan Station, people who might have been Indians at the Kursk Station and the Kiev Station. Nothing definite. They found Dzharova’s father, but he’d put her on the train to Tashkent three days before. He knew about her Indian lover—that’s why he sent her home. Caught them at it apparently.”
Ruzhkov’s face clouded over for an instant. Remembering catching his wife, McColl guessed.
“What really enraged him,” the Russian went on, “was the man’s color—it seems the party’s policy on racial tolerance hasn’t taken hold in Turkestan.” Ruzhkov looked up, as if expecting sympathy for this ideological setback. “Anyway,” he continued, “they put a call through to the Samara Cheka with instructions to hold the girl for questioning when the train arrives there. Which might be today, might be in a week’s time—the railways are in chaos.” He snorted with apparent amusement. “Would you believe that five whole trains have been lost since the New Year? They’ve completely disappeared. Vanished off the face of the earth.”
Thirty-six hours had passed since McColl’s first encounter with Komarov, and he was beginning to feel a little more sanguine about his chances of staying free. An optimist might have considered his situation—an unsuspected spy close to the heart of an official investigation into the very matter that had brought him to Russia—close to ideal, but as far as McColl was concerned, that would be overstating the case, and he was determined not to let down his guard. Nerves were good for you, as his school PE teacher used to say, teaching his charges how to dive into an icy loch through the stunningly simple expedient of making them walk the plank.
Wending their way through the galleries of the newly reopened history museum, McColl and Ruzhkov were entering one that housed a Mongol tent or yurt. A selection of yak-tail banners, bows, and quivers hung from the walls; displays of whistling arrows filled several glass-topped cabinets, complete with typed explanations of how the Mongols had used them in battle for transmitting tactical orders.
“Fascinating,” Ruzhkov said, leaning in so close to the glass that his breath formed a circle of steam.
“So they’re just waiting around?” McColl asked hopefully.
Ruzhkov straightened, holding his back. “Oh no. Deputy Chairman Komarov is not the idle sort. He has no other life, so neither do his men. When there’s something big on—and there almost always is—all of them work every hour God gives. And unlike most of them, he’s a real stickler for the rules. His wife died of hunger two winters ago because he wouldn’t bend them to get her an extra ration. At least, that’s the story, and it wouldn’t surprise me. That kind of dedication is frightening.”
Absurdly so, McColl thought. �
�So what have they been doing, then?” he asked.
“There are three things Komarov wants to know,” Ruzhkov said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Who the Russian was, where the American and his friends were living, and what it’s all about. He grilled all our men who were undercover at the Universalist, but they weren’t very helpful. All the turncoats talked about was India and some new Menshevik named Gandhi. Have you heard of him?”
“I have,” McColl said. He had actually met the man twice, once over twenty years before when Gandhi and another Indian medical orderly had carried him down on a stretcher from the Spion Kop plateau, the second time in 1915 when he’d stopped to visit Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad on his way home from Calcutta. But this didn’t seem the time for reminiscing.
“Well, the men in this group went on and on about him. And they don’t like him one bit. The Indians in particular.”
“Why not?” McColl asked.
Ruzhkov shrugged. “Because he’s a Menshevik, I suppose. You know what they were like—they talked a good revolution, but they didn’t really want much to change.” Ruzhkov rubbed his eyes. “But I wouldn’t rely too much on any of this. The men we had there were not the brightest.”
“We” was now the Cheka—Ruzhkov had trouble with personal pronouns. “So that was all—India and Gandhi?”
“That was all.”
They were now perusing an intricate re-creation of a battle—the one fought beside the Kalka River in 1223, according to the inscription. The model river itself was full of finely crafted corpses and patches of red staining. “The Mongols never shed the blood of princes,” Ruzhkov said. “So they rolled the Prince of Kiev in a carpet and suffocated him.” He giggled.
India and Gandhi, McColl was thinking. What were these men planning?
“Last night our men raided the Universalist,” Ruzhkov was saying. “Took about fifty people in. They’re still interrogating them,” Ruzhkov said. “They’ve found out the American lived in Serpukhovskaya, but no one seems to know exactly where. They’re making street inquiries as well.”
“They haven’t discovered anything about the Russian who died at the Lux?”
“Not a thing. He could have come from the moon.”
“And the others in the group?”
“They know who they are. An Armenian named Aram Shahumian and a Russian named Sergei Piatakov. Both served with Brady in the Red Army back in 1918.”
“What else can you tell me about Komarov?”
“He’s a really big wheel, very close to Dzerzhinsky. Komarov was a policeman before he joined the Bolshevik underground, and it’s said that the two of them met in Yauzskaya police station when Dzerzhinsky was brought in under arrest. Komarov’s father was a minor clerk in some ministry, nothing grand. His wife died a year or so ago, and they never had any children. They say only Dzerzhinsky and Yakov Peters have signed more death warrants, but Dzerzhinsky and Komarov have been trying to persuade the party leadership to abolish the death penalty again. Maybe they both have writer’s cramp. Maybe . . . It’s a madhouse, you know, an absolute madhouse. Do you know what I had to arrange yesterday? There’s some idiot wandering around the city at night painting white flowers on doors, and we can’t catch him. So my boss decided we should get a painter of our own, and have him go around and overpaint them in red. If that isn’t crazy, what is?”
She was alone and hard at work when he entered the office, and so absorbed that she became aware of his presence only when a shadow loomed across the desk. She looked up, felt a lump in her throat.
“No, we haven’t found him,” Komarov said, searching for somewhere to sit. He chose the edge of Fanya’s desk, perching there like a vulture, she thought. Since their last meeting she’d asked several comrades about him, but only one had met him, more than seven years earlier, at a clandestine meeting in 1914 of the Bolshevik underground network in Moscow. According to the witness, Komarov hadn’t said much, but those that did had often looked his way, as if seeking his approval.
He had a way of making Caitlin feel out of her depth, which both intrigued and annoyed her. “What do you want then?” she asked briskly. “I’m very busy this morning.”
“This won’t take long. Have you remembered anything since we spoke that might help us locate your husband?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me if you had?”
The question threw her for a moment, partly because it seemed absurdly playful, partly because she wasn’t sure of her answer. “Of course,” she said, with only the faintest hint of sarcasm.
He smiled and changed tack. “Would you say your husband was a believer in permanent revolution, comrade?”
She considered. “We’re all waiting for new revolutions to help make ours more secure,” she said primly.
“Some of us are getting used to the idea that we shall have to survive on our own,” Komarov responded dryly, “but that is not what I meant. There are some comrades, respected comrades, who argue that we can only avoid going into reverse by running faster and faster.”
“What a strange image,” she said, finally putting down her pen. “Did you come here for an ideological discussion, comrade?”
“Not really. Enlightenment perhaps.” He kneaded his jaw with his thumb and forefinger. “I like to understand the crimes I investigate. And why they are committed.”
“To help you catch the criminals?”
“In part. But I also just like things explained. Though as someone reminded me recently, to explain is not to excuse.”
“Could there be any excuse for what Sergei and his friends have done?” she asked. “You told me that five men had died already, three of them innocent. And heaven knows how many more will if Aidan Brady’s the one in charge.”
“Our Russia’s knee-deep in dead men,” he said.
“Does that make any difference?”
He looked at the floor for several moments. “I really don’t know,” he said. “It shouldn’t, but it has to. Groups of Bolsheviks committed crimes like this in the years before the revolution and probably for much the same reason—a need of funds to further their political ends. And though we said we regretted any loss of life, we saluted the deed and welcomed the money and half-believed that no one who got in our way could be completely innocent. These men—your husband and the others—I assume they feel the same. And, if by some miracle they overthrow the party and set up their own government, the crime they committed the other day won’t just be excused—it’ll become a glorious chapter in their new revolution’s history.”
“But they won’t succeed,” Caitlin said.
“No, they won’t. But losing doesn’t make them wrong, merely on the wrong side of the law.”
“Your law.”
“The party’s law, comrade. Someone has to decide what is permitted and what is not,” he said matter-of-factly, easing himself off the desk, “and for us it can only be the party.”
The telephone rang. It was for him. She walked across to the window, looked out on the sunlit street, listened to him repeat an address in Serpukhovskaya.
“We’ve found the room where your husband’s comrades were living,” he told her. “And the five are now six. An Indian,” he added quickly, obviously noticing her alarm. “I am sorry. I will inform you myself if your husband is found.”
Before or after having him shot? she wondered, as the click of Komarov’s heels faded on the stairs.
The house in Serpukhovskaya was an old one, and the single bourgeois family who’d occupied it before the revolution had given way to ten or more families living in single or paired rooms. The children playing in the stairwell fell silent as the Cheka men climbed, then burst back into noisy life the moment they reached the room at the top. Komarov could smell the corpse from outside the door; the Indian was laid out on one of three old mattresses.
This face w
as locked in terror.
“Take him to the morgue,” Komarov told two of his subordinates after taking a long look. He went to the window for a gulp of fresh air and stood there for a moment, enjoying the view across the rooftops, before turning to examine the room.
There was a three-legged table and a homemade brick stove, its ramshackle pipe chimney disappearing through a rough-hewn gap in the roof. A rusty typewriter sat on a cupboard that had lost all its drawers. Taken for fuel, Komarov assumed, like the missing floorboards in the corner; over the last three winters Moscow rooms had been turned into stage sets by the hunger for wood. On one raid earlier that year, they’d found a room with three armchairs, each positioned over a neatly cut hole in the floor.
He stirred the ashes in the stove—nothing. He lifted each mattress, and under the third found a scrunched-up piece of paper bearing the words Gone to Library. The American, Komarov decided. There was something about the large scrawl that suggested a foreigner.
“Nothing,” Maslov muttered.
“On the contrary,” Komarov said, passing him the piece of paper.
“How does that help us?”
“Think,” Komarov suggested.
Maslov thought. “If we find the library, we might get a better description,” he said sceptically.
Komarov sighed. “If we find the library, we might find out what they’re planning.”
Maslov looked at him blankly.
“If you were planning to cause some trouble, in a place that you didn’t know well, you would probably do some research.”
Several miles to the north, McColl heaved himself up and over a brick wall. What had been a garden was now a jungle, and as he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, he could hear the animal population taking evasive action. Which was all to the good. Those quadrupeds that had survived the last few winters in Moscow would have sharp reflexes and even sharper teeth.
The back door of the house sprung open at a touch. He stepped inside, heard the scamper of more tiny feet, and carefully worked his way toward the front, where a faint yellow light shone through the glassless window above the boarded entrance.
The Dark Clouds Shining Page 14
